Producer of Controversy

Like many liberals, independent film producer and director Stanley Kramer, known for his socially conscious “message movies” in the post–World War II period, found himself under siege by leftist radicals in the late 1960s. Widely panned as a lickspittle, his reputation never recovered. Jennifer Frost's new book revives Kramer's important role in Hollywood history as a “producer of controversy,” a nickname coined by the film reviewer Bosley Crowther in 1961. With clear prose and engaging primary sources from Kramer's papers, Federal Bureau of Investigation records, and State Department memos, Frost argues that Kramer helped shape moviemaking into the “new Hollywood” model and shift the industry toward liberalism during a conservative time by challenging blacklisting and by making films that provoked public conversation on controversial issues. Frost takes a case study approach, focusing on four films Kramer directed: The Defiant Ones (1958), On the Beach (1959), Inherit the Wind (1960), and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). This selection makes sense, as all four films received widespread public attention, did at least modestly well at the box office, and were groundbreaking in some way. Frost characterizes The Defiant Ones as a leftist film with more complexity for Sidney Poitier's role than often recognized (critics then and since have characterized Poitier as a patient helper to the white man); On the Beach as undermining the Cold War consensus on nuclear war; Inherit the Wind as helping dismantle the blacklist even if it misread historical trends regarding evangelicals; and Judgment at Nuremberg as the first international, public discussion of the Holocaust. She also demonstrates Kramer's ongoing relevancy with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), a film about interracial marriage (then widely frowned upon), and with his “cinematic diplomacy” as a defender of American values in his frequent participation in the Moscow International Film Festival

Art history · Hollywood · Liberalism · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law